Coming Soon(ish): 5 Tech Features of Future Cars

It’s always fun to predict technologies that will be used in the cars of the future. We like to imagine cars that fly (by themselves!), cars that operate on renewable resources, cars that can travel at speeds beyond sound and approaching light, and of course cars that can take us back and forth through time.

It’s a great exercise in imagination and fictional engineering. That’s not to say that we won’t ever have cars with those features in the future (maybe), but probably not in our lifetimes. And probably not in our children’s, either.

What’s even more fun, is to guess where cars might be in just fifteen to twenty years. This is an even better exercise, because not only do we stretch our creativity, but we also have the added joy of possibly getting to actually use the tech while we’re still young (and alive) enough to enjoy it!

So, here’s a look at what cars of the near future might reasonably offer in terms of significant technology upgrades.

Sorry, no flying cars. That might be a while…

5 Features We Might See in Near-Future Cars

#5 Car-to-Car Communication

When it comes to knowing what other drivers on the road are up to, we can only ever trust our eyes–and proximity sensors on some of the more upscale cars. But what if I told you that pretty soon, vehicles will be able to communicate with each other, giving us a huge advantage in avoiding collisions.

There’s technology that’s being developed right now by Ford called V2V (Vehicle-to-Vehicle). The idea behind V2V is that cars on the road will be able to tell each other where they are, how fast they’re going, and in which direction they’re heading.

This info can then be used to avoid crashes by either alerting the driver or by giving the car itself access to brake or swerve or speed up accordingly.

It sounds fantastically fictional, but the fact that companies like Ford are working on it (and have been for several years) tells us that it’s a fiction that might very soon become a reality.